This seems to be a common question raised after an initial question was raised on a forum. It can leave the original poster feeling shunned and left out, however it, generally, has nothing to do with the original poster being disliked. One poster recently put up a message asking “Why aren’t people listening to me?”
If people cannot help then they tend not to reply. This is not because they are not listening, but because they don’t know the answer. It would be very noisy on a forum if someone posted a question and got a reply from every member saying “Sorry, I don’t know the answer to your question”.
Sometimes people need to clarify the question. This happens a lot. But, even after that clarification there is no guarantee that someone is able to help. Again, the lack of replies isn’t because people are being rude, it would, as above, get very noisy if the original poster got a reply from everyone reading it saying “Sorry, I still can’t help you”.
Often the original poster will write something that gives away their level of skill. Usually this skill level is way below that required to complete the task they are attempting. For example: “I’m new to programming and I want to write a RGP”, “I just started with C# and I want to create a chat application”.
That is a great thing to want to learn how to develop software, but trying to build a role playing game or a chat application is a massively complex task for a beginner. To answer the question to a level required by a beginner would take a very long response. Much longer that anyone would take to type into a forum. I’m guessing that a good book would suit them better, so in this scenario people are unlikely to respond to the original poster.
For someone that has just started programming then I would suggest they start with something simpler. To understand why take this example: I’ve just bought a guitar so I can learn to play. At the moment I can play 3 chords (just) and it takes me quite a few seconds to switch between them and then a lot of finger adjusting so that the notes sound good. If I went on a guitar website and said “I just started learning the guitar. I want to play Bohemian Rhapsody like Brian May, how do I do that?” I would most likely be laughed off the forum, or at best given the advice that I have a long way to practice yet.
I would suggest that a beginner has a long way to practice before getting into complex systems like RPGs or chat applications. I would suggest starting with simpler games like noughts-and-crosses or hangman and build up from there.
So, my advice for the beginner is to learn to walk before trying to run, work through tutorials, design and build simple programs that demonstrate some aspect of an RPG game (For example a character has an inventory of items - so learn about collections, arrays, lists and so on) or chat application (which involves network communications - so learn about sockets and how networks work) and eventually they can start putting all that together and actually create an RPG game or chat application.
Addendum (7th August 2026)
It turns out that I’m bad at taking my own advice. I can think of many instances over the 20 years since I originally wrote this that I tried to do too much in one go when learning a new technology. And with AI it has exacerbated the issue as I’ve attempted to vibe code my way out of issues on technology I was insufficiently familiar with. I suspect I am not the only one.
